TED2008
Johnny Lee: Free or cheap Wii Remote hacks
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Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.
Johnny Lee - Human-computer interaction researcher
Researcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks -- bending the low-cost game piece to power an interactive whiteboard, a multitouch surface, a head-mounted display ... Full bio
Researcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks -- bending the low-cost game piece to power an interactive whiteboard, a multitouch surface, a head-mounted display ... Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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So, as researchers, something that we often do is use immense resources
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to achieve certain capabilities, or achieve certain goals.
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And this is essential to the progress of science,
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or exploration of what is possible.
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But it sort of creates this unfortunate situation
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where a tiny, tiny fraction of the world
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can actually participate in this exploration
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or can benefit from that technology.
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And something that motivates me,
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and what gets me really excited about my research,
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is when I see simple opportunities
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to drastically change that distribution
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and make the technology accessible
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to a much wider percentage of the population.
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And I'm going to show you two videos
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that have gotten a lot of attention recently
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that I think embody this philosophy.
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And they actually use the Nintendo Wii remote.
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Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with this device,
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it's a $40 video game controller.
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And it's mostly advertised for its motion sensor capabilities:
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so you can swing a tennis racket, or hit a baseball bat.
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But what actually interests me a lot more
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is the fact that in the tip of each controller
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is a relatively high-performing infrared camera.
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And I'm going to show you two demos of why this is useful.
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So here, I have my computer set up with the projector,
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and I have a Wii remote sitting on top of it.
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And, for example, if you're in a school
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that doesn't have a lot money, which is probably a lot of schools,
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or if you're in an office environment,
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and you want an interactive whiteboard,
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normally these cost about two to three thousand dollars.
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So what I'm going to show you how to do
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is how to create one with a Wii remote.
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Now, this requires another piece of hardware,
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which is this infrared pen.
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You can probably make this yourself for about five dollars
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with a quick trip to the Radio Shack.
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It's essentially got a battery, a button and an infrared LED,
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and it turns on -- you guys can't see it --
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but it turns on whenever I push the button.
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Now, what this means is that if I run this piece of software,
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the camera sees the infrared dot,
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and I can register the location of the camera pixels
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to the projector pixels. And now this is like a whiteboard surface.
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(Applause)
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So for about $50 of hardware, you can have your own whiteboard.
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This is Adobe Photoshop.
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(Applause)
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Thank you.
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(Laughter)
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Now, the software for this I've actually put on my website
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and have let people download it for free.
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And in the three months that this project has been public,
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it's been downloaded over half a million times.
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So teachers and students all around the world
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are already using this.
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(Applause)
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I want to quickly say that although it does do it for 50 dollars,
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there are some limitations of this approach.
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But you get about 80 percent of the way there,
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for about one percent of the cost.
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Another nice thing is that a camera can see multiple dots,
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so this is actually
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a multi-touch, interactive whiteboard system as well.
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(Applause)
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For the second demo, I have this Wii remote
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that's actually next to the TV.
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So it's pointing away from the display,
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rather than pointing at the display.
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And why this is interesting
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is that if you put on, say, a pair of safety glasses,
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that have two infrared dots in them,
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what these two dots are essentially going to give you
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is, give the computer an approximation of your head location.
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And why this is interesting
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is I have this sort of application running on the computer monitor,
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which has a 3D room, with some targets floating in it.
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And you can see that it looks like a 3D room -- if
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you can see -- kind of like a video game, it sort of looks 3D,
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but for the most part, the image looks pretty flat,
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and bound to the surface of the screen.
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But if we turn on head tracking,
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the computer can change the image that's on the screen
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and make it respond to the head movements.
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So let's switch back to that.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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So this has actually been a little bit startling
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to the game development community.
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(Laughter)
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Because this is about 10 dollars of additional hardware
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if you already have a Nintendo Wii.
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So I'm looking forward to seeing some games,
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and actually Louis Castle, that's him down there,
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last week announced that Electronic Arts,
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one of the largest game publishers, is releasing a game in May
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that has a little Easter egg feature
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for supporting this type of head tracking.
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So -- and that's from less than five months
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from a prototype in my lab to a major commercial product.
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(Applause)
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04:47
Thank you.
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But actually, to me, what's almost more interesting
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than either of these two products
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is how people actually found out about them.
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YouTube has really changed the way, or changed the speed,
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in which a single individual
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can actually spread an idea around the world.
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You know, I'm doing some research in my lab with a video camera,
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and within the first week, a million people had seen this work,
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and literally within days, engineers, teachers and students
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from around the world, were already posting their own YouTube videos
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of them using my system or derivatives of this work.
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So I hope to see more of that in the future,
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and hope online video distribution
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to be embraced by the research community.
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So thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Johnny Lee - Human-computer interaction researcherResearcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks -- bending the low-cost game piece to power an interactive whiteboard, a multitouch surface, a head-mounted display ...
Why you should listen
To understand Johnny Lee, just take a look at his website. Aside from his Wii Remote hacks -- voted the #1 tech demo of all time by Digg -- you can see all the other places his mind has turned: typography, photography, urban renewal ... to say nothing of his interesting sideline in Little Great Ideas, like the hypnotic "___ will ___ you."
After earning his PhD from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, he joined the team at Microsoft responsible for Project Natal, a controller-free motion sensing device for the Xbox 360. He's since turned his attention to accelerated technology R&D at Google.
Johnny Lee | Speaker | TED.com